Refusing a breathalyzer test is against the law and brings a fine here in Minnesota.
So, you're saying Minnesota has taken one more step down the road to "guilty until proven innocent". Gotcha.
Many states it does as well.
Many states have laws about not allowing the police to collect that sort of evidence, but most don't specifically state you must take an at-the-scene breathalyzer. You can generally request a blood test (and should if you are innocent, since they are far more accurate) instead.
A corporation that hopes to get away with stuff like this should lose ALL patents and copyrights they currently own. However we'd have to make sure there's no way for every company to just set up dummy holding corps for their patents that they'd then "license" back to themselves.
If you are going to write a law with enough teeth to remove their patents from their name, I suspect the law could also prohibit them from continuing to license any patents they currently license.
This still doesn't prevent them from hiding their patents in another company and not licensing them, but that exposes risks in case the other company becomes controlled by someone not friendly.
So anyone who doesnt agree with you and might think that infringing copyright is a bad thing MUST be 'astroturfing'. What a closed-minded view.
First, WOOSH!
To explain...the point is that the "astroturfer" is as guilty of actually astroturfing as the "file sharer" is of actually sharing copyrighted material in a manner that is not permitted. At this point, both are just accusations, but at least here on/. there is a way to allow the accused to prove the accusation is false.
Most of these "three strikes" copyright laws aren't even "guilty until proven innocent". They are "guilty if any large corporation that holds copyrights says you are".
Since there are no provisions in these laws for false accusations, the correct solution is to find the IP addresses of any of the people in power who passed these laws and accuse them of sharing your copyrighted content.
Most PCs have had working standby/hibernation since the late 90's. Combine that with Wake-on-LAN and you can have a machine that's always available (within a few seconds), yet goes to sleep when not in use.
I think that these days, if you are connected to a network, you can't standby effectively if many apps are open.
If you have a web browser with any "Web 2.0" page open, there may be refreshes, and things like IM, VPN, ssh, e-mail clients, etc., will all be hitting the network. I don't know how much "waking" a system would have to do to satisfy these requests, but it can't be zero and still keep them running.
If you have the physical disks, you can install and play any Valve game (or at least anything HL2 or before) in single-player mode without even having an Internet connection.
Allowing you to download the product in addition to having the physical disks is a convenience, not a right. Valve doesn't have to offer this...they do so because they are a fairly nice company overall.
Yes, you had a problem, but the only thing you lost was the ability to download that game from Steam. Perhaps Valve's customer service could have been better, but their lack of resolution for the issue doesn't stop you from playing the game. You still have the game you purchased, and it still works just fine.
I don't ever want to limit your knowledge or understanding of the world.
Creative works are different.
So, what you're saying is that there is nothing in any creative work that would in any way increase my knowledge or understanding of the world.
Well, then, I suppose we shouldn't have things like libraries and museums that look to preserve creative works for future generations.
How about we start with An Inconvenient Truth as the first thing that we make sure gets as little distribution as possible, because it has no information in it, being a "creative work". Yes, that's probably flamebait, but I'm trying to make a point, here, people.
But of course, a tiny movie budget won't give you the next Star Wars any more then a tiny game budget will give you the next Half Life, that however doesn't mean they can't be good in their own way.
I think a group of talented people could easily take the budget for the original Star Wars (about $13 million) and make a much better movie than any of the last three that George Lucas has put out.
Sure, you wouldn't have monster special effects, but you don't need those to make a good movie.
And if it is on Steam? Too bad because I will never use it. All of you with Steam accounts are just one keygen away from losing one of your games or more.
If you don't purchase the boxed game, this is not an issue.
The collision with a keygen serial number can only happen if you use the boxed game to unlock the download from Steam.
I have 3 running right now because I have two VPN connections to different networks using the Cisco VPN client
The security rules of some VPN connections (that force everything through the VPN and effectively cut you off from the local network) meant that you had to have a lot of boxes just to make up your "workstation".
Now, with VMs, you can have the VPN connection, get to the local network, and be able to transfer data from the local network to the other end of the VPN. This has basically restored my sanity (and made the flash drives I had purchased for sneakernet much less useful).
I tried the 4350 first but it was PCI-E 2.0 and the Dell I used would only take original PCI-E cards; which the NVidia is.
PCI Express 2.0 cards are supposed to be backward compatible so that on a PCIe 1.1 bus, they fall back to the slower speeds. Since the PCIe 1.1 bus can't possibly know about PCIe 2.0 cards, it's the responsibility of the card—not the motherboard—to adjust.
So, I'd suspect that whatever company made the 4350 you bought didn't quite follow the spec.
It's a free program and they already do checks to see if you have a valid installation so why leave it on the system when it can be downloaded?
In the case of IE, it would largely be because many users could not figure out how to download something without using IE in the first place.
Although most people would not disable IE unless they had another browser, it could be done in error.
I do think that disabling IE should be something that raises red flags (like UAC), since malware could disable IE and replace it with a thin executable that used mshtml.dll to render pages. It would be the ultimate in malicious Browser Helper Objects.
Some torrent starters merely take content from another torrent, add a file or two (which are usually links to websites) and then RAR the whole thing up. This forces people to download the entire RAR instead of being able to tell their BitTorrent client to not download the spam link files.
I suppose it helps force people to seed for a while, but most recent torrents don't have any problem with seeders.
So you are clever enough to know how to use it as a mass storage device...
If "just plugging it in" == "clever", then, OK, I'm clever.
Every USB device I have that acts as mass storage was configured as that by default...I would have to have changed a setting to put it in to a mode that made not appear as a drive. Even my camcorders that use Firewire haven't needed any special software, although they appear as a camera, not a drive.
Again, most of these devices still have a special program that can be installed and will pop up when that specific device is plugged in, but with a default Windows install, just plugging in the device gets the standard autorun dialog. I guess everyone else is as sick as I am of seeing that useless dialog with the "always do this" checkbox that never seems to be remembered, so they always install the software for their devices.
Other than USB memory sticks, most USB devices seem to require a special app anyway.
Although most USB devices seem to come with a special app that you can install, very few of them absolutely require it.
Most generic music players and cameras work just fine acting as mass storage devices. I even have a GPS that supports DRM-encumbered music and audio books, and the special app was only required once--to read the serial number off the GPS and send to the server so that future downloads will have the correct encryption applied.
I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download "Death Magnetic" for free, it's me.
Wrong.
And wrong because unless Metallica is unusual, the copyright on the CD itself is held by the record company, not Metallica (or Lars Ulrich).
There are many stories of bands getting in trouble with their record company because they copied CDs of their own music to sell or give away.
But, if Metallica/Lars do hold copyright on Death Magnetic then they have just given all downloaders an out for this particular content: with P2P, Lars was uploading, and if he holds copyright, then he is allowed to do that, and it would be assumed that he knew that others were downloading from him.
I'm not sure why you think an ESX server takes a lot of electricity. Except for using it 24/7 (and doing otherwise makes it less than useful), a fairly powerful ESX server can run just fine on a 400 watt power supply.
A PC with a modern medium to high end graphics card will take as much power as an ESX server running an 8-core system with 16GB of RAM and more than 1TB of RAID-protected disk. And, this is a supported SuperMicro server.
That simply says to me that the person doesn't have balance in his/her life. It also says a lot about things like passion and the ability to see projects through.
Are you saying that because I spent my time working on my lawn and not open source projects that I don't have "balance in my life"? Excuse me? What, exactly, are you smoking?
You can substitute anything completely not relevant to my job search for "working on my lawn". Doesn't it seem that somebody who writes code at work and the goes home and does nothing but work on more code for open-source projects would have less "balance", not more?
Do you realize what kind of liability you could open your company up to if you show the contents of an employee's desk to the cops without their permission?
No liability at all.
There is much case law that basically says that employees have no right of privacy for anything that is company owned or controlled. That would mean facilities, offices, e-mail, computers, desks, etc.
I agree you should still say "no" to the cops without a warrant, but not because of liability concerns...you do it for the principle.
Except that you don't see any desktop makers supporting 8GB of ram yet... (32GB on the mac pro.) How long has 64Bit vista been out now? Go find a consumer focused piece of hardware that can do that from HP or Dell or Lenovo..
It's pretty easy to find close to that...the Dell Studio XPS 435 supports 24GB, and comes standard with 6GB.
With an Intel Core i7-920, 6GB of RAM, 750GB of hard drive, a Radeon 4670 and a base price of $1549, it pretty much kicks the base Mac Pro around. The only real difference is that you can get a Mac Pro with two processors, but the i7 is so much better than the Xeons in the Mac Pro, you don't need more than 4 cores.
In this case, they'll probably ignore the judge's requirements to send an "authority" and then say, "Well that sounds good, but I lack the power to agree or disagree," during the settlement meeting.
Based on the judge's order, I'd say that if that happens, expect to see some record company executives found in contempt of court.
In particular, since that person wouldn't have the authority, the judge would ask for the name of the person that directed them to come. Once Federal judges get actual names of people, it can get quite nasty if you don't do what they say.
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Refusing a breathalyzer test is against the law and brings a fine here in Minnesota.
So, you're saying Minnesota has taken one more step down the road to "guilty until proven innocent". Gotcha.
Many states it does as well.
Many states have laws about not allowing the police to collect that sort of evidence, but most don't specifically state you must take an at-the-scene breathalyzer. You can generally request a blood test (and should if you are innocent, since they are far more accurate) instead.
A corporation that hopes to get away with stuff like this should lose ALL patents and copyrights they currently own. However we'd have to make sure there's no way for every company to just set up dummy holding corps for their patents that they'd then "license" back to themselves.
If you are going to write a law with enough teeth to remove their patents from their name, I suspect the law could also prohibit them from continuing to license any patents they currently license.
This still doesn't prevent them from hiding their patents in another company and not licensing them, but that exposes risks in case the other company becomes controlled by someone not friendly.
So anyone who doesnt agree with you and might think that infringing copyright is a bad thing MUST be 'astroturfing'. What a closed-minded view.
First, WOOSH!
To explain...the point is that the "astroturfer" is as guilty of actually astroturfing as the "file sharer" is of actually sharing copyrighted material in a manner that is not permitted. At this point, both are just accusations, but at least here on /. there is a way to allow the accused to prove the accusation is false.
Most of these "three strikes" copyright laws aren't even "guilty until proven innocent". They are "guilty if any large corporation that holds copyrights says you are".
Since there are no provisions in these laws for false accusations, the correct solution is to find the IP addresses of any of the people in power who passed these laws and accuse them of sharing your copyrighted content.
Most PCs have had working standby/hibernation since the late 90's. Combine that with Wake-on-LAN and you can have a machine that's always available (within a few seconds), yet goes to sleep when not in use.
I think that these days, if you are connected to a network, you can't standby effectively if many apps are open.
If you have a web browser with any "Web 2.0" page open, there may be refreshes, and things like IM, VPN, ssh, e-mail clients, etc., will all be hitting the network. I don't know how much "waking" a system would have to do to satisfy these requests, but it can't be zero and still keep them running.
If you have the physical disks, you can install and play any Valve game (or at least anything HL2 or before) in single-player mode without even having an Internet connection.
Allowing you to download the product in addition to having the physical disks is a convenience, not a right. Valve doesn't have to offer this...they do so because they are a fairly nice company overall.
Yes, you had a problem, but the only thing you lost was the ability to download that game from Steam. Perhaps Valve's customer service could have been better, but their lack of resolution for the issue doesn't stop you from playing the game. You still have the game you purchased, and it still works just fine.
I don't ever want to limit your knowledge or understanding of the world.
Creative works are different.
So, what you're saying is that there is nothing in any creative work that would in any way increase my knowledge or understanding of the world.
Well, then, I suppose we shouldn't have things like libraries and museums that look to preserve creative works for future generations.
How about we start with An Inconvenient Truth as the first thing that we make sure gets as little distribution as possible, because it has no information in it, being a "creative work". Yes, that's probably flamebait, but I'm trying to make a point, here, people.
But of course, a tiny movie budget won't give you the next Star Wars any more then a tiny game budget will give you the next Half Life, that however doesn't mean they can't be good in their own way.
I think a group of talented people could easily take the budget for the original Star Wars (about $13 million) and make a much better movie than any of the last three that George Lucas has put out.
Sure, you wouldn't have monster special effects, but you don't need those to make a good movie.
And if it is on Steam? Too bad because I will never use it. All of you with Steam accounts are just one keygen away from losing one of your games or more.
If you don't purchase the boxed game, this is not an issue.
The collision with a keygen serial number can only happen if you use the boxed game to unlock the download from Steam.
I have 3 running right now because I have two VPN connections to different networks using the Cisco VPN client
The security rules of some VPN connections (that force everything through the VPN and effectively cut you off from the local network) meant that you had to have a lot of boxes just to make up your "workstation".
Now, with VMs, you can have the VPN connection, get to the local network, and be able to transfer data from the local network to the other end of the VPN. This has basically restored my sanity (and made the flash drives I had purchased for sneakernet much less useful).
I tried the 4350 first but it was PCI-E 2.0 and the Dell I used would only take original PCI-E cards; which the NVidia is.
PCI Express 2.0 cards are supposed to be backward compatible so that on a PCIe 1.1 bus, they fall back to the slower speeds. Since the PCIe 1.1 bus can't possibly know about PCIe 2.0 cards, it's the responsibility of the card—not the motherboard—to adjust.
So, I'd suspect that whatever company made the 4350 you bought didn't quite follow the spec.
It's a free program and they already do checks to see if you have a valid installation so why leave it on the system when it can be downloaded?
In the case of IE, it would largely be because many users could not figure out how to download something without using IE in the first place.
Although most people would not disable IE unless they had another browser, it could be done in error.
I do think that disabling IE should be something that raises red flags (like UAC), since malware could disable IE and replace it with a thin executable that used mshtml.dll to render pages. It would be the ultimate in malicious Browser Helper Objects.
Similarly, Radeon 4350 cards are in the $50 or less category, and have hardware decoding for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 HD.
They don't play games real well (although older games work great), but for video watching, they are more than enough.
Some torrent starters merely take content from another torrent, add a file or two (which are usually links to websites) and then RAR the whole thing up. This forces people to download the entire RAR instead of being able to tell their BitTorrent client to not download the spam link files.
I suppose it helps force people to seed for a while, but most recent torrents don't have any problem with seeders.
So you are clever enough to know how to use it as a mass storage device...
If "just plugging it in" == "clever", then, OK, I'm clever.
Every USB device I have that acts as mass storage was configured as that by default...I would have to have changed a setting to put it in to a mode that made not appear as a drive. Even my camcorders that use Firewire haven't needed any special software, although they appear as a camera, not a drive.
Again, most of these devices still have a special program that can be installed and will pop up when that specific device is plugged in, but with a default Windows install, just plugging in the device gets the standard autorun dialog. I guess everyone else is as sick as I am of seeing that useless dialog with the "always do this" checkbox that never seems to be remembered, so they always install the software for their devices.
Duck season!
Other than USB memory sticks, most USB devices seem to require a special app anyway.
Although most USB devices seem to come with a special app that you can install, very few of them absolutely require it.
Most generic music players and cameras work just fine acting as mass storage devices. I even have a GPS that supports DRM-encumbered music and audio books, and the special app was only required once--to read the serial number off the GPS and send to the server so that future downloads will have the correct encryption applied.
I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download "Death Magnetic" for free, it's me.
Wrong.
And wrong because unless Metallica is unusual, the copyright on the CD itself is held by the record company, not Metallica (or Lars Ulrich).
There are many stories of bands getting in trouble with their record company because they copied CDs of their own music to sell or give away.
But, if Metallica/Lars do hold copyright on Death Magnetic then they have just given all downloaders an out for this particular content: with P2P, Lars was uploading, and if he holds copyright, then he is allowed to do that, and it would be assumed that he knew that others were downloading from him.
I'm not sure why you think an ESX server takes a lot of electricity. Except for using it 24/7 (and doing otherwise makes it less than useful), a fairly powerful ESX server can run just fine on a 400 watt power supply.
A PC with a modern medium to high end graphics card will take as much power as an ESX server running an 8-core system with 16GB of RAM and more than 1TB of RAID-protected disk. And, this is a supported SuperMicro server.
That simply says to me that the person doesn't have balance in his/her life. It also says a lot about things like passion and the ability to see projects through.
Are you saying that because I spent my time working on my lawn and not open source projects that I don't have "balance in my life"? Excuse me? What, exactly, are you smoking?
You can substitute anything completely not relevant to my job search for "working on my lawn". Doesn't it seem that somebody who writes code at work and the goes home and does nothing but work on more code for open-source projects would have less "balance", not more?
<sarcasm>
So, that's why every hiring manager has the standard list of questions they ask about your personal life:
</sarcasm>
Do you realize what kind of liability you could open your company up to if you show the contents of an employee's desk to the cops without their permission?
No liability at all.
There is much case law that basically says that employees have no right of privacy for anything that is company owned or controlled. That would mean facilities, offices, e-mail, computers, desks, etc.
I agree you should still say "no" to the cops without a warrant, but not because of liability concerns...you do it for the principle.
Except that you don't see any desktop makers supporting 8GB of ram yet... (32GB on the mac pro.) How long has 64Bit vista been out now? Go find a consumer focused piece of hardware that can do that from HP or Dell or Lenovo..
It's pretty easy to find close to that...the Dell Studio XPS 435 supports 24GB, and comes standard with 6GB.
With an Intel Core i7-920, 6GB of RAM, 750GB of hard drive, a Radeon 4670 and a base price of $1549, it pretty much kicks the base Mac Pro around. The only real difference is that you can get a Mac Pro with two processors, but the i7 is so much better than the Xeons in the Mac Pro, you don't need more than 4 cores.
I don't think people who want to install an eSATA or SCSI card in a mid-ranged Apple computer are in the majority.
SCSI, maybe, but eSATA isn't very exotic with cards less than $40.
If you want real performance with an external drive, you're going to want eSATA, and more external drive cases support it than support FireWire 800.
In this case, they'll probably ignore the judge's requirements to send an "authority" and then say, "Well that sounds good, but I lack the power to agree or disagree," during the settlement meeting.
Based on the judge's order, I'd say that if that happens, expect to see some record company executives found in contempt of court.
In particular, since that person wouldn't have the authority, the judge would ask for the name of the person that directed them to come. Once Federal judges get actual names of people, it can get quite nasty if you don't do what they say.